Monday, May 16, 2011

On May 16

On this day in ...... 1164, Héloïse d’Argenteuil died at about age 63 or 64. She was a scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, who gave birth to a child out of wedlock, fathered by her teacher, the philosopher and theologian Peter Abélard. Thereafter she entered a French convent and he became a monk. The love letters between the couple are widely read to this day. (credit for image of her, "imagined in a mid-19th-century engraving")